I have never minded growing older, but it does seem just a little odd when your younger sisters start to hit their 60s. Still, today’s 60th birthday party for Caroline, and a distinctly lower birthday threshold for family friend (and Caroline’s goddaughter) Marina (de Borchgrave Niblett), was a delight. It spanned the full age spectrum, from babies to quite a few people in their 90s – who tended to cluster in the kitchen, near the Aga.
Due to the number of incoming vehicles, this was first time I had ever used the car park behind St Peter’s Church. Am always reminded as I walk down the path from the church to the village, via a small valley in which a rivulet runs down towards the Dickler or Windrush, that in Black Death days survivors would move a village across the nearest water, because they thought it acted as a barrier to the pestilence.
Scraping all that aside, it has been wonderful to see an array of age-old friends, cousins (Adamsons, Griffins, et al) and joyously assorted others. The cocktail bar in the gifted marquee did a roaring trade, perhaps partly because at one stage some of my nephews and nieces (who were technically in charge) forgot to put in the mixers.
The weather fulfilled Tim’s gloomy forecast of a week or so ago, for heavy rain. But during the party it alternated between hot sunshine and gently spitting rainclouds. Still, the rain that had thumped down on us during our journey westward from London this morning had apparently decided not to get on Caroline’s bad side.
The only thing missing was a fly past from the Red Arrows, which used to be based at the RAF station on the top of the hill behind us – and keep us all amused during their acrobatic training.
Reading the Wikipedia entry flagged a couple of lines above, I was surprised to hear of the rumours of a nearby underground hospital for a post-nuclear situation. Odd, because at one point after he moved on from RAF Little Rissington, Tim had something to do with post-nuclear civil defence in one of his roles. Who knows?
Extraordinary to recall that he was one of the RAF pilots who flew monitoring missions in Avro Shackletons around the British H-bomb test bursts on Christmas Island in the 1950s, in some part of Operation Grapple, when we were living in Northern Ireland. At the time, nuclear Armageddon seemed imminent much of the time.
Given the oasis they have created over the decades since 1959 at Hill House, it’s worth recalling what happened when Tim went off to Christmas Island. He had left Pat in a fairly isolated farmhouse in the Irish countryside, outside Limavady, at a time when the IRA were still fairly active. He had a land line laid, with a hand-cranked handset, in case of emergency. And on one of the first evenings the line went dead.
After a fretful night, a party was sent out to find out what had happened – to find that sheep had chewed through the line where it had been taken through a culvert,
Caroline, tiny then, went on to become an axis mundi (here’s background on that for those who haven’t come across one) for an ever-expanding family and social ecosystem.
So today was a welcome chance for many of us to say thank you to a key member of our tripartite (the other members being Pat and Tim) axis of what, a long time ago, was called Clarke’s Hill Farm House. (Though I’ll probably be corrected on that final ‘e’.)
